Computer unmasks Anonymous writer...

The Feb 16, 96 edition of the Baltimore Sun announces that a computer
program similar to one used to attribute unknown poems to William
Shakespeare has been turned to solving the mystery of who wrote
the best selling book, _Primary Colors._ The work was apparently
done by Donald Foster a professor at Vassar College who discovered
that both Joe Klein and the author of _Primary Colors_ used these
adjectives quite often:

especially, entirely, fiercely, incredibly, mortally, particularily,
precisely, profoundly, reflexively, relentlessly, seriously, subtly,
surprisingly, ultimately, utterly, vaguely, wistfully

More information will be published in an article slated to run in the
copy of _New York_ magazine that goes on sale on Monday. This article
seems to be the major source for the Sun piece.

If Joe Klein, a well-known political writer, is indeed the author, it
is clear that he didn't learn one of the first lessons of Washington.
If you're going to leak information or quotes to the world, make sure
you use the diction of your enemy. That's ventriloquism Washington
style.

-Peter Wayner

> The Feb 16, 96 edition of the Baltimore Sun announces that a computer
> program similar to one used to attribute unknown poems to William
> Shakespeare has been turned to solving the mystery of who wrote
> the best selling book, _Primary Colors._

Suppose you didn't trust the from fields in usenet articles, and you
wanted to index everything so that you could pull up articles that appear
to have been written by the same person.  How would you go about doing
this?  Would you set up n statistical measures for text, assign each
article an n-tuple, and look for points that are near each other? 

Isn't this a similar problem to indexing satellite photos or 
fingerprints?  How good are the spooks at doing that sort of thing?